The Modes of the Hemispheres IIIA
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
A talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. Richard Rorty
The Left Hemisphere, which closes down to certainty rather than opening up to possibility, has, Iain McGilchrist has said, a “built-in” tendency to usurp the purview of the Right Hemisphere. How so, and what does the condition of capture by the left hemisphere look like?
A hilarious rendition of the ungoverned left hemisphere in action is offered by George C. Scott in the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, dir., 1964). Scott plays General Buck Turgidson, the top military adviser to President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). They and others are in the War Room trying to deal with a little problem created because a paranoid Air Force General named Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has ordered a surprise nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.
Ripper, who is no fool, has also concealed the codes needed to call the B-52 bombers back.
As the bombers draw closer to their targets, President Muffley calls Premier Dmitri Kissov of the Soviet Union to tell him about this disagreeable turn of events. Kissov then drops a bomb on Muffley, so to speak: the Soviets have built and installed a Doomsday Machine that will automatically execute an all-out attack on the United States with missiles armed with “cobalt-thorium” bombs—whose fallout will be deadly for 93 years—if a nuclear weapon should detonate on their territory. He was waiting until the upcoming Party Congress to announce it as a nice surprise.
The Machine is designed to launch the attack if anyone tries to disable it.
President Muffley now tries to help. He lets Premier Kissov know the targets, flight plans, and defensive systems of the incoming B-52 bombers so that the Soviets can shoot them down, which they do, except for one that gets through.
Muffley turns to General Turgidson and asks if the bomber that got through has a realistic chance of getting to its target. In a masterful over-the-top performance (that he might have been tricked into by the director, Stanley Kubrick), George C. Scott as General Turgidson launches into a wildly enthusiastic, even gleeful account of the skills and tactics that would would almost certainly allow the pilot to get through. Only at the end of this recital does it hit Turgidson that, under the circumstances, this is not the ideal outcome. Scott does a wonderful job rendering the moment of realization—the eyes widening, the words fading, the finger rising to his lips.
Dr. Strangelove himself (also Peter Sellers) is, we are to understand, a former—and maybe not so former—Nazi. We might also fairly characterize him—and General Turgidson until the moment of realization—as someone entirely in thrall to the left hemisphere.
Strangelove’s character might have been modeled on several actual people of the time who had heavy accents and were supporters of the nuclear enterprise: Hermann Kahn of the RAND Corporation and author of Thinking about the Unthinkable (1962); Edward Teller, who had been part of the Manhattan Project and all along a single-minded devotee of the hydrogen bomb; and Wernher von Braun, who actually was a former Nazi. During World War II, Von Braun had led the Nazi’s missile program. After the War, Von Braun had been brought with other German scientists to the United States where he made important contributions to the American rocket program. Some people later thought Henry Kissinger might have been the model for Strangelove, but in 1964, when the movie was released, Kissinger was still an on-the-make academic.
Kubrick said it was von Braun.
Dr. Strangelove is able to put a happy face on the possibility of the Doomsday Machine’s being activated, I won’t say how. You really should see the movie if you haven’t. Some people think it is one of the best movies ever made.
Kubrick said he had originally intended to tell a serious story about a nuclear disaster, like the one depicted in the suspense novel Red Alert (1959) that he had optioned. But, according to the McMillan International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, in the early weeks of working on the screenplay, Kubrick found, he said,
that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.
Kubrick found he couldn’t ignore the ironies and paradoxes of the situation, as in You Might Want to Know I also have not been able to do. So Strangelove became a comedy, what’s called a “black comedy,” a comedy not with a happy but with a nightmare ending.
In any case, the LH doesn’t do irony or comedy, McGilchrist explains. Insults and put-downs and slogans and name-calling, but not irony or comedy. Victory parades, maybe, but not irony or comedy.